Agroforestry and Social Forestry Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The National Agroforestry Policy was launched in February 2014.

India became the first country to adopt a national agroforestry policy, launched at the World Congress on Agroforestry in Delhi in February 2014. It aims to encourage trees on farms to improve farmers' incomes, meet wood demand and protect the environment.

The 2010 and 2012 dates are earlier than the policy, which was still being drafted then.

Answer: D

This is agroforestry.

Agroforestry is a land-use system in which trees and shrubs are deliberately grown on the same unit of land as agricultural crops and/or livestock, for ecological and economic benefit from the combination. Agrisilvicultural, silvopastoral and agrosilvopastoral systems are its main forms.

Farm forestry means raising trees on farm land, mainly for wood and income, without necessarily integrating crops and animals. Extensive forestry is low-input management of large forest areas, and urban forestry is the management of trees in towns.

Answer: A

The main function of shelterbelts is to protect the crop from high wind velocity.

Shelterbelts are long rows of trees and shrubs planted across the direction of the prevailing wind. They reduce wind speed on the leeward side over a distance of many times their height, which cuts soil erosion, lowers evaporation and prevents mechanical damage to crops.

They may also add some biodiversity or shade, but those are side benefits. Shade over crops is the aim of other agroforestry systems, and shelterbelts do not protect crops from insect pests and diseases.

Answer: C

The answer is Conservation of genetic diversity of plants and animals.

The National Agroforestry Policy, 2014 lists among its objectives: to encourage and expand tree plantation in a complementary and integrated manner with crops and livestock; to protect and stabilise ecosystems and promote resilient cropping and farming systems; to supplement the availability of agroforestry products such as fuelwood, fodder and timber; and to meet the raw-material needs of wood-based industries.

The conservation of the genetic diversity of plants and animals is the business of biodiversity and conservation policies, not a basic objective of this policy.

Answer: B

This is a shelter belt.

A shelterbelt is a wide belt of trees, shrubs and grasses, usually several rows deep, planted across the direction of the prevailing wind to protect fields, buildings and livestock and to reduce wind erosion over a large area.

A windbreak is a narrower barrier, often one or two rows, protecting a smaller area such as a homestead or orchard. Alley cropping grows crops between hedgerows of trees, and plantation is a general term for raising trees artificially.

Answer: D

Taungya cultivation started in Burma.

The taungya system, in which farmers grow food crops between the rows of young forest trees during the first years of a plantation, was introduced by Dietrich Brandis in the teak forests of Burma in 1856. The word comes from Burmese for 'hill cultivation'. It was later taken up in India, first in Bengal in the 1890s.

North Bengal adopted the system after Burma, and China and Nepal were not where it began.

Taungya lets foresters raise plantations cheaply, because the cultivators weed and tend the young trees while growing their own crops.

Answer: D

The tree that does not play a significant role in fixing nitrogen is Mangifera indica, the mango.

Biological nitrogen fixation by trees is mainly carried out by legumes, whose root nodules house Rhizobium bacteria that convert atmospheric nitrogen into compounds plants can use. Pongamia pinnata (karanj), Pithecellobium dulce (Manila tamarind) and Dalbergia sissoo (shisham) are all leguminous trees and are planted partly to enrich the soil.

Mango belongs to the family Anacardiaceae, has no nitrogen-fixing nodules, and so does not enrich the soil with nitrogen.

Answer: C

Reducing the area under cultivation is not a goal of the National Agroforestry Policy, 2014.

India's National Agroforestry Policy of 2014, the first such national policy in the world, aims to encourage the planting of trees on farmland together with crops and livestock. Its goals include setting up a National Agroforestry Mission, improving productivity, income and livelihoods of small farmers, and meeting the growing demand for timber, food, fodder, fuel and fibre while reducing pressure on natural forests.

Agroforestry integrates trees with farming on the same land; it is not meant to take land out of cultivation, so that option is the odd one out.

Answer: C

The definition is that of agroforestry.

Agroforestry is a land use system in which woody perennials, trees and shrubs, are deliberately grown on the same piece of land as agricultural crops and/or animals, in some spatial arrangement or time sequence, so that they interact ecologically and economically. Examples include trees on farm boundaries, alley cropping and silvopasture.

Social forestry is tree planting for community needs on public and common land, urban forestry the management of trees in towns, and forestry in general the management of forests; none requires crops or animals on the same unit of land.

Answer: B

The key gives (a), (b) and (c) only, so statement (d) is the false one.

Statements (a), (b) and (c) describe the aims of social forestry: raising trees on community and degraded land to meet the needs of fuel, small timber and fodder, creating local employment, and improving the look of the landscape. The statement that A. Voelkar coined the term in 1968 is not supported: forestry texts credit the term to Jack Westoby of the FAO, who used it in his address at the Ninth Commonwealth Forestry Conference in New Delhi in 1968. I found no source linking the term to anyone named Voelkar.

The options that include (d) are therefore wrong, and the option with (a) and (b) only leaves out the true statement (c).